The scene is as familiar as it is tragic: A devastating hurricane or earthquake strikes a populated area in a poor country, inflicting a high number of casualties, overwhelming the resources and capacity of rescue teams and hospital emergency rooms. First responders must resort to “triage” – the medical strategy of maximizing the efficient use of existing resources to save lives, while minimizing the number of deaths.

Housing funds are already scarce, which is why we propose – along the lines of what was originally proposed in Peace of Mind in Earthquake Country– to start by taking a page from medical manuals and follow a triage strategy for housing risk reduction:

First, identify housing where risk cannot be reduced and where intervention will certainly save lives. Houses located in high-risk areas, such as landslide areas, must be declared uninhabitable and the residents resettled.

Second, identify housing with very highstructural risks that can be repaired or reduced substantially. Like emergency responders’ expertise in knowing which victims need immediate care, civil/structural engineers can eyeball a row of informal housing and know in a few minutes which units have structural problems that can be solved at an affordable cost to make once-deadly structures safe enough that even insurance companies will offer coverage.

The large majority of substandard housing units in the developing world are found in areas where risk can be mitigated and have been built with safe materials and respectable construction methods. Using housing triage – which has low up-front costs to identify and retrofit these houses – can save lives.

However, triage alone will not make housing more resilient. Any resilient housing policy should also include:

Incentives for homeowners willing to invest in improving the life safety of their homes; and

Affordable loans and insurance products to make houses safer and keep them that way.

Governments worldwide are already investing in retrofitting the schools where children spend only one-third of their time. Why not invest in making the structures safer where children spend two-thirds of their time?

People-centered. Microfinance products combined with retrofitting subsidies could allow families – in one single intervention – to make improvements that would increase quality of life for the occupants while adding resilient housing solutions to the market.

Massive but rapid. Retrofitting responds much faster than supply of new housing units and, given the high incidence of qualitative housing deficit, the demand is massive.

Affordable. Recent research in Indonesia, Haiti, Nepal, Colombia, Peru and Guatemala, and extensive experience in California and Japan, shows that structural retrofitting could cost anywhere between 1% and 20% of the value of the property.

Standardized. Retrofit solutions and techniques that could raise a building to minimal safety standards are no different than those used in new construction.

Simple. Although the techniques involved or the materials may vary, the overarching engineering principles are similar.

Formal. Retrofitting is the pathway to formality. Through a streamlined administrative process, it could be possible to add legal protection to the increased physical security achieved by the retrofitting.

Measurable. The vulnerability of housing to natural disasters is one of governments’ biggest worries. That vulnerability can be measured and reduced, which means that retrofitting programs could help governments focus their programs and take risk off their books.

Safer homes will not only save lives in the short term, but will also, over time, transform informal areas into the kind of livable and productive neighborhoods that we know drive economic growth in the world’s cities.

This blog post was originally published on May 24, 2017 (available in Spanish) and updated on July 25, 2017.

Comments

a push to get residents to retrofit substandard housing and make it safer is critical. This is possible to do cheaply by public education of the public especially the youth. It is an angle worth pursuing.

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